I just moved over from Rebecca MATE to LMDE Cinnamon. Love it--it's so much faster than Rebecca, even on xfce or mate. I've had a few issues, but none that a reboot or a little hacking hasn't fixed. However, I am unable to extract a .tar.gz file from within the gui. I can right-click it and select "Extract here" option, but it runs "eric5.5.2" or something to that effect (sorry, I'm away from it right now) and then exits with the message "An error occured while extracting files. Error setting owner: operation not permitted"
I did successfully extract it by running

I should have no rights problem as I am admin and this is in my /home/fred/Downloads directory.
!No hablo espanol! I've tried but just can't get the hang of it... Nice language though if you can speak it!
Can you translate the solution for me? Gracia, senor (or senorita).

"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy."
- Albert Einstein

As I said it's no help. The threadstarter there used a different program to solve this somewhat like you did using terminal. engrampa in MATE 1.8 (can't tell you about 1.6, which is LMDE's current MATE-version) works fine with tar.gz if you want to try that. There do not seem too many dependencies to other MATE-packages, so it should work fine on a Cinnamon DE.
File a bug report. Cinnamon is made by Mint developers, they should fix this.